Hello in Malayalam

Priya's been asking me to teach her Spanish, so today I taught her how to say 'hola' and 'como estas' in exchange for some Malayalam. Priya is from Kerala, in Southern India, and she speaks Malayalam, and just getting the pronunciation of the name of the language right took me awhile. They have two L sounds (that I know of so far) in Malayalam. And you'll notice, there are two Ls in the word "Malayalam". It's actually a palindrome. Priya pointed that out to me by saying "it's one of those English things" while waving her finger back and forth through the air in a symmetrical pattern.  "Like racecar?" I asked her. "Exactly." She said. "I know what you mean," I said.

I wanted to know how to say "how are you" in Malayalam.  It's actually, "are you well?", and it's "Sukharam?"  And hello is "namastaram." I'm in search of a Malayalam word that doesn't end in 'am'.  Priya says that nobody ever uses namastaram, instead they all say "hi", a holdover from British colonialism. I told her the Chinese say "have you had your lunch?" instead of "how are you?". She asked how to say "have you had your lunch?" in Spanish. I told her, "ya comiste?" Then Mariam told us how to say "arabic" in arabic, and truthfully if you don't speak arabic you can't pronounce it. So I pronounced it the English way, which also happens to be the Spanish way. After that our heads exploded.

So far Arabic kind of reminds me of German, probably for all the gutteral sounds. And Malayalam reminds me of Pig Latin. The Greeks used to make fun of the way Barbarians talked by mocking them, saying "Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar," ha, ha, ha very funny (that's why they came to be known as Barbarians.) Today, I like to make fun of the way the Dutch sound by mocking them, saying "opedy dopedy mopedy wopedy opedy". And you could easily make fun of Malayalam by saying "I'm-am going-am to-am the-am store-am today-am." But I hope we'll keep this exchange up; I can't wait to ask about Malayalam verb structure.